Journal of early southern decorative arts [serial]

Ml M ) \

JOURNAL
of

EARLY SOUTHERN
DECORATIVE ARTS

May, 1988

Volume XIV, Number 1

The Museum of Early Southern

Decorative Arts

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Members of the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts receive the Jouma/vf/ke
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is published in February and August. Other privileges include notification of the classes
and programs and lectures offered by the Museum, an Annual Member's Weekend with
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free admission to the Museum.

The Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts is owned and operated by Old Salem, Inc.,
the non-profit corporation that is responsible for the restoration and operation of Old Salem, Moravian
Congregation Town founded in 1766. MESDA is an educational institution with the established
purpose of collecting, preserving, documenting and researching representative examples of southern
decorative arts and craftsmanship from the 1600s to 1820. The Museum exhibits its collection for
public interest and study.

For further information, please write to MESDA, Box 10310, Salem Station, Winston-Salem,
North Carolina 27108. Telephone (919) 722-6148.

JOURNAL
of

EARLY SOUTHERN

DECORATIVE ARTS

May, 1988

Volume XIV, Number 1

Published twice yearly in

May and November by

The Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts

Copyright © 1988 Old Salem, Inc.
Winston-Salem, North Carolina 27108

Printed by Hall Printing Company
High Point, North Carolina

11

Contents

Four Mecklenburg County, North Carolina Chairs:

An Examination of Style and Technology 1

Dale L. Couch

William Byrd and His Portrait Collection 1 9

David Meschutt

111

Figure 1. Pairof side chairs, 1780-1800. Mecklenburg County, North Carolina,
woods not recorded. HOA: 38", Height at seat: 13", WOA: 19 1/2, DOA:
not recorded. M.ESDA research file: S- 132 38.

IV

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Vour Mecklenburg County, North Carolina Chairs:
An Examination of Style and Technology

Dale L. Couch

During the third quarter of the eighteenth century, large
numbers of Scots-Irish, EngHsh, and German settlers emigrated
to central North Carolina from southeastern Pennsylvania, both
eastern and western Maryland, and from western Virginia. The
Scots-Irish were the first to reach what is now Mecklenburg
County, where they rapidly claimed the most fertile land in the
central Yadkin River valley. A large contingent of Pennsylvania
Germans, however, settled in the Catawba River Valley just to
the west of the Yadkin; this area of settlement included northern
Mecklenburg County.'

A small group of closely-related chairs from that region reveal
the presence of a strong chairmaking tradition in northern
Mecklenburg during the eighteenth century.^ This group includes
three identical side chairs (Figs. 1 and 2) and a child's chair (Fig.
3). The chair illustrated in figure 2 has base rounds of hickory;
the posts and slats are of maple. One of the side chairs (Fig. 2)
retains traces of green paint, and the child's chair was painted
blue, the finish now heavily oxidized. The original finish of the
other two chairs is not known.

The pronounced ball turnings (Figs. 2b, 3a) on the front
stretchers of these chairs is their most prominent stylistic feature,
and the most unusual aspect of their character in comparison with
other similar chairs of the southern Piedmont. Slightly elongated
in profile, these balls are deeply scored in the center, possibly
with the point of a skew chisel. The balls are flanked by turned
cavettos with fillets (the square-shouldered rings at each side of

May, 1988

the coves, Fig. 2b). Fine scoring is used to emphasize both the
fillets and the heavy scored line in the center of the ball. The
definition of the cavetto turnings themselves is heightened by

Figure 2. Side chair, 1780-1800, Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, hickory
and maple. HO A: 39 1/8", Height at seat: 14 1/8", WO A at feet: 20 1/4",
DO A at feet: 13 3/8". MESDA accession 3916, photographs by George S.
Whiteley, IV.

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the approximately one inch of swell of the stretchers at each side
of the center turnings.

The upper front round (Fig. 3b) of the child's chair is an
interesting variation of this ball turning. A plain flaring cove is
substituted for the full cavetto turning. This abbreviated shape
appears to be a visual solution to the trapezoidal space created
by the splay of the legs. The shorter length of the upper stretcher

Figure 2a. Side view.

May, 1988

Figure 2b. Detail of stretcher.

calls for a sense of graduation in the turnings that is provided
by the contrasting upper turning. The effect of this graduation,
and indeed of the visual balance of the chair, is diminished by
an improperly-replaced right front leg which does not match the
eighty-degree splay of the left leg.

The posts of these chairs taper from bottom to top, a feature
which is particularly accentuated by the greater length of the rear
posts. The seats of the side chairs are relatively low, approximately
fifteen inches on the chair in figure 2, thereby providing the
appearance of greater vertical height to the backs. The feet of
the chairs in figure 1 are missing most of their original height.
In each instance, all four feet are turned. Although turned rear
feet may be found on northern chairs, particularly early examples,
they are far more common in the South. With the exception of
the neck where these feet touch the floor, the ovoid profiles (Fig.
2e) generally reflect the center turning of the front stretcher. This
is not true of the more diminutive rear feet (Fig. 3d) of the child's
chair, however. All of the feet which retain their full height are
deeply scored in the center, again following the form of the
stretcher turnings, as do the cavettos at the top of each of the
front feet. This necking is omitted from the rear feet, and the
turnings are less robust.

All of the finials on these chairs are virtually identical. They
are composed of a ball-like knop (Figs. 2c, 3c) surmounting a pair
of cove turnings, much in the style of simpler versions of chair

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finials common to the Connecticut River Valley. This sort of finial,
however, very likely represents nothing more than a strong British
tradition, for it occurs on chairs from Maine to Alabama.

The slats on this group of chairs are competently shaped, and
represent a strong regional stylistic development. They show
evidence of riving, but only in a minor way, since the surfaces
are well finished. Many southern Piedmont chairs, in contrast,
show relatively little dressing of their slats, and consequently

Figure 2c. Detail of finial.

May, 1988

display prominent split surfaces. The bottom edge of each slat
of the Mecklenburg chairs forms a pendant at the center, possibly
a derivation of chairmaking styles that originated in the Low
Countries; similar slats on Dutch ladderback chairs occur in
engravings as early as the sixteenth century. The precise shaping
of the slats, coupled with the fact that they show very little
graduation in height, indicates the probable use of a pattern to
lay them out. The chairmaker sharply chamfered the upper front
edge of each slat, probably using both a drawknife and a
spokeshave, providing a sense of delicacy to the slats while at the
same time accentuating the arc of their tops. Thin squarish
trunnels inserted from the rear pin the top and third slats to the
back posts of the side chairs; similar trunnels are used only for
the top slat of the youth chair.

Figure 2d. Detail of front foot.

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Figure 2e. Detail of rear foot.

The tenons on the base rounds of these chairs reveal tech-
nological signatures of this chairmaker's work.^ Several of these
tenons are exposed on the youth chair, and two tenons of the
side chair in figure 2 have been X-rayed. Following the tradi-
tional construction of a post-and-round chair, the tenons appear
to have been turned on the lathe. The tenons of the seat lists
were cut by hand, since the somewhat oval form of the lists did
not permit lathe-turning. The lists are cut in this form to provide
extra strength, a feature common to most post-and-round chairs.
After the tenons of the base rounds were turned, the artisan
whittled an indentation in the tenons just forward of the tenon
shoulders. This notching is evident in the X-ray, which illustrates
the upper line of a round and its tenon (Fig. 2f). The semi-green
wood of the posts shrank into the notches after the chair was
completed, as the X-ray reveals, thereby providing a locked joint
which could not pull apart. This was common practice in the
production of all turned chairs, but it was far more common for
the chairmaker to turn the tenons with a bag-shaped profile rather
than to trim them by hand with an edge-tool.

May, 1988

Figure 2f. X-ray of base round and tenon. Courtesy of Dr. Sheri Katz, DDS.

After whittling the shoulder indentation into the tenon, the
chairmaker shaved the sides flat (Fig. 2g), and chamfered the ends
to permit the tenon to be driven into a slightly undersize hole.
Following usual practice, the holes for the tenons on these chairs
appear to have been drilled with a spoon-bit auger which left
a round-bottomed cavity. Shaving the tenon flat on both sides,
like the whittled shoulder notches, is somewhat at variance with
usual chairmaking methodology. The flats, however, served at
least two purposes: once the tenon was inserted and the post had
shrunk around it, the flats prevented the rung from rotating within
the mortise. Further, by reducing surface area, the flats allowed
the tenons to be driven into their undersized mortises with greater
ease.

Two empty mortises on the upper posts of the child's chair
present an interesting question of how the chair was used. Such
exposed mortises on back posts usually indicate the loss of arms.
Evidence demonstrates, however, that these mortises represent
a nineteenth-century adaptation of the chair to the role of an
infant's high chair. The upper mortises were bored after assembly,
and they intersect the slat tenon on the right post, not a usual
practice except on some seventeenth and early eighteenth century
New England chairs. There is no indication that arm supports

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were cut off the front posts. In addition, the twelve-inch depth
of the chair seat is too large for an infant, and the height of the
seat is nineteen inches, lower than most high chairs. Foot wear
is concentrated upon the upper front stretcher, just at the proper
height for an older child rather than an infant.

The empty mortises may have been intended to receive a
flexible bent rod or perhaps even a simple joined frame as a guard
to retain an infant. The original form of the chair, however, is
that of a child's side chair. Although rarer than armed high chairs,
such tall side chairs are occasionally encountered, particularly in
the Delaware Valley region.

Aside from this possible geographic relationship in regard to
an unusual form of chair, there are other significant ties between
the Mecklenburg County chairs and the work of Delaware Valley
chairmakers. Ladderback chairs in the classic Philadelphia-area
style are characterized by a number of highly recognizable details,
such as delicately tapered front and rear posts, considerable
verticality that is accentuated by four to six deeply-arched
graduated slats, vase turnings below the seat on the front legs,
bold vase-and-ring-turned front stretchers, and robust ball or
turnip-shaped front feet that are usually larger in diameter than
the legs. The rear posts commonly have a sharply radiused taper
where they meet the floor. Finials are normally in the form of
a compressed ball, or take the form of an acorn-like turning. Seats
are usually of rush, and occasionally are surrounded by an applied
skirt shaped on the bottom edges. Most of the salient features
of this style are embodied in the side chair in figure 4.

.^>:^.

Figure 2g. Artist's rendering showing the side flats of a tenon. Drawing by
Sara Deli Autry.

May, 1988

Figure 5. Child's side chair. 1780-1800, Mecklenburg County, North Carolina.
Woods not recorded. HO A: not recorded, Height at seat: 19", WO A: not
recorded, DO A: 12". Private Collection, photographs hy George S. Whiteley,
IV.

10

MESDA

Figure 3a. Detail of bottom stretcher.

The Mecklenburg County chairs illustrated here are a stylistic
extension of the southeastern Pennsylvania fashion, although with
significant divergences. The same sense of verticality, coupled with
the delicate tapered legs, provide the strongest details which bear
comparison with Pennsylvania work. New England chairs tend
to have front legs that are essentially the same diameter from top
to bottom, and rarely are the feet larger than the diameter of
the legs. The form of the slats, the Connecticut Valley-like
fmials, and the turned rear feet, however, reveal the merging of

Figure 5b. Detail of top stretcher.

May, 1988

11

other traditions and /or the development of regional style in
Mecklenburg. The feet seem to represent a local modification of
the Pennsylvania norm, particularly in regard to their relatively
large diameter and strong cavetto turning separating them from
the legs. However, the legs lack the dramatic radiused tapering
just above the cavetto that is typical of the Delaware Valley, and
the feet of the North Carolina chairs have much greater vertical
height. However, the large geographic distribution of the

Figure 3c. Detail of finial.

12

MESDA

Figure 3d. Detail of rear foot.

Delaware Valley style in chairmaking, even within Pennsylvania
proper, brought about regional developments that contrast with
Philadelphia. An armchair (Fig. 5) in the collection of the Yale
University Art Gallery, for example, has turned arms quite unlike
the sawn arms that are usual on Delaware Valley work. The arm
supports on this chair are less architectural than one might expect
on Philadelphia work, and, most importantly, the massive front
stretchers have oblong ball turnings in their centers which are
remarkably like those of the North Carolina examples.
Pennsylvania couches, very likely Philadelphia work, of an earlier
date have been observed with the same detail. This armchair,
however, more than likely was the product of an outlying county
such as Chester or Lancaster.

There is little to indicate that the Piedmont artisan who made
these chairs either was trained in the Delaware Valley or simply

May, 1988

13

Figure 4. Side chair, Delaware Rtver Valley of Pennsylvania, 1770-1790. Maple.
HOA: 41 11/16"; Height at seat: 163/8"; WOA: 18 1/2"; DOA: 13 13/16".
Courtesy Old Salem, Inc., MRF S-14279.

attempted to recreate the visual drama of a transplanted northern
prototype. Some other North Carolina seating furniture, in fact,
reveals a far greater use of the Pennsylvania stylistic vocabulary.
The fact that two of these chairs descended in a Scots-Irish family
suggests that the artisan may have worked after the period of initial

14

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settlement and during a period in which the acculturation of
several ethnic groups was taking place in the Carolina Piedmont.
It is possible that the digression from the classical Delaware Valley

Figure 3. Armchair, Delaware River Valley (or adjacent counties) of Pennsylvania,
1720-1760. Maple. HOA: 41 1/4", Height at seat: 16 3/8", WOA: 18", DOA:
14". Courtesy of the Yale University Art Gallery, Mabel Brady Garvan
Collection, accession 1930-2042.

May, 1988

15

style is the result of just such a cultural confluence among these
ethnic groups.

Ultimately, the Mecklenburg County chairs are the product
of Piedmont mannerism. They demonstrate the retention of
elements of a chairmaking tradition which had traversed several
hundred miles of the back country South. At the same time,
however, they strongly reflect the substantial geographic separation
from more urban centers of style. They are the product of an
artisan working in markedly different circumstances. While the
Mecklenburg County chairs convey a simpler aesthetic than their
northern counterparts, they make a fine regional statement of
their own.

Mr. Couch is a reference archivist at the Georgia Department of Archives
and History in Atlanta. He was a participant in the 1986
MESDA/UNCG Summer Institute.

16 MESDA

FOOTNOTES

For the settlement history of Mecklenburg County, see the following: J.
B. Alexander, M.D., The History of Mecklenburg County, from 1740-1900
(Charlotte: Observer Printing House, 1902); G. D. Bernheim, History of
the German Settlements in North and South Carolina (Philadelphia, 1872;
reprinted, Baltimore: Regional Publishing Company, 1975); D. A.
Tompkins, History of Mecklenburg County and the City of Charlotte,
1740-1903, 2 vols. (Charlotte: Observer Printing House, 1903); Robert W.
Ramsay, Carolina Cradle: Settlement of the Northwest Carolina Frontier,
1747-1762 (Chapel Hill, N.C.: The University of North Carolina Press,
1964).

Each of these chairs has retained provenance. The pair of side chairs (Fig.
1) recorded by MESDA are noted to have descended in the Torrence and
Ladda families of Huntersville in northern Mecklenburg County. (MESDA
research file S-13238). The side chair (Fig. 2) now in MESDA's collection
has a history of descent in the Nantz (or Nance), Ladda, and Knox families
of the Huntersville-Kernias area; the child's chair was found in the same
general area.

The Torrence family was a Scots-Irish family who emigrated to North
Carolina from Pennsylvania. They were distributed throughout central
Piedmont North Carolina, including Mecklenburg County. The Nantz
family appear to be of Germanic Pennsylvania origin. For condensed
treatments of these genealogies see: The Heritage of Iredell County,
published by the Genealogical Society of Iredell County, Statesville, North
Carolina, 1980. For consolidated documentary sources on these families
see; The Mary Louise McCubbins Collection, Rowan Public Library,
Salisbury, North Carolina (filmed by Genealogical Society of Salt Lake Ci-
ty, Utah in 1956). For information on the Ladda-Torrence connection, see:
Mrs. J. B. Eaves, Sketch of Lineal Descendents of Samuel Wilson, Sr.. (Rock
Hill, S. C: The London Printery, undated, c. 1900-1925), p. 108.
For an excellent treatment of chairmaking in general, and for a lucid
explanation of chair joints, see: John D. Alexander, Jr., Make a Chair From
a Tree: An Introduction to Working with Green W'oo^ (Newton, Conn.:
The Taunton Press, 1978). See particularly pages 69 through 77 for tenon
construction.

The author would like to thank George Whiteley IV and George Pearl
for photographs, Susan Dell Au try for her drawing in Figure 2g, and
Dr. Shen Katz D. D. S. for the X-ray reproduced here. The author would
also like to thank O. O. Thompson, Jr. , for his careful help in gathering
information regarding provenance.

May, 1988 17

Figure 1. Westover, by Lucy Harrison, daughter of Benjamin Harrison of
Brandon, 1823-1830. Ink and water color on paper, full size 9 3/4X6 5/16;
this view is a detail and represents the south front of the house. MESDA Research
File (MRF) 14276.

18

MESDA

William Byrd and His Portrait Collection
David Meschutt

The will of Mrs. William Byrd III (nee Mary Willing), probated
on 20 April 1814, is a most remarkable document, for it contains
a checklist of what was at one time the most distinguished portrait
collection in America — that of her father-in-law, William Byrd
II. The will lists some thirty paintings (see Appendix) that either
belonged or probably belonged to him, in addition to another
dozen that appear to have been added to the collection after his
death and were presumably the property of his son, William III.
We are concerned here only with those paintings once owned by
William Byrd II and his motivation for assembling such a
collection. 1

William Byrd II was born on his father's plantation in Virginia
on 28 March 1674. His father, also named William, was the son
of a London goldsmith and had come to Virginia before 1670.
William I's uncle, Thomas Stegge, was the auditor general of
the colony and carried on an extensive fur trade with the Indians.
He had amassed a great deal of money and property, but,
although he was married, he had no children. He persuaded
William I, his sister's eldest son, to emigrate to the New World
with the promise of making him his heir. Not long after the young
man's arrival, Stegge died and William I, only 18, inherited the
estate. In 1673 he married a widow, Mary Horsmanden Filmer;
his first child and only son was born the following year.^

When he was about seven, William II was sent to England
for his education. Although his father had also grown up in the
mother country, their circumstances were very different. William
II was the son and heir of a wealthy planter, while his father had

May, 1988 19

been the child of a goldsmith of modest means. Young William
was placed in the care of his maternal grandfather, Warham
Horsmanden, a country gentleman of Purleigh, Essex, who
enrolled the boy in the local academy, Felsted Grammar School.
Felsted's purpose was to give its students "a gentleman's
education"; it had a reputation for emphasizing both piety and
learning. Oliver Cromwell had sent his sons there. Byrd received
a classical education, learned Latin and Greek, and developed
an appreciation for literature that never deserted him. His
classmates were the sons of the local gentry of Essex and Surrey;
Byrd, the colonial, must have stood out from them. It may be
that his years at Felsted were less than pleasant, for he never
mentioned the school in his diaries, letters, or other writings. He
did not send his own son to school in England. ^

Many of Byrd's Felsted classmates went on to Oxford or
Cambridge, but William Byrd I had not sent his son to school
merely to become a scholar. When William II was sixteen, he
was sent to Holland to serve as an apprentice to two merchants
in Rotterdam. However, he did not care for the country, and
returned to England to continue his business training with the
London counting house of Perry & Lane. In 1692 he commenced
the study of law at Middle Temple.'*

He enrolled there as William Byrd, ' 'son and heir of William
Byrd of Cree Church, London, Esq." By emphasizing his father's
English origins, Byrd identified himself as an Englishman. His
classmates were at the top of London society; among them were
the noted playwright William Congreve and the dramatist and
future editor of Shakepeare, Nicholas Rowe. Shortly after he was
admitted to the bar in 1695, Byrd met Sir Robert Southwell
(1635-1702), the principal secretary of state for Ireland and
president of the Royal Society. ^ It was through Southwell's
influence that Byrd was elected to membership in the Society.
This was a great honor, and considering that he was only
twenty-two, a surprising one as well. The Society membership
very likely represents more about Byrd's personality and his effect
on people than about his aptitude for scientific research, for
although Byrd was very interested in natural history, he was by
no means prominent in that field. He obviously made a good
impression, and Sir Robert regarded him as a protege, a person
of much promise. Byrd was proud both of his membership in
the society and of his friendship with Southwell; both are noted
on his tombstone.*^ Through Southwell he met a number of

20 MESDA

scholars and noblemen, including Charles Boyle, Earl of Orrery;
John Campbell, Duke of Argyll; John Perceval, Earl of Egmont;
and Charles (later Sir Charles) Wager, who later was appointed
First Lord of the Admiralty. All of them became Byrd's friends,
and he eventually owned portraits of each one.

Except for a brief stay in Virginia in 1696-1697, Byrd remained
in England until his father's death in 1704. He returned to
Virginia to claim his inheritance, which included all of his father's
land, 26,231 acres. The best portions of the estate comprised the
lands on the James River where the city of Richmond was later
located,^ as well as the fourteen-hundred acre plantation called
Westover, in Charles City County.^ (Fig. 1) Byrd succeeded his
father as receiver-general of Virginia and established himself as
one of the colony's leading citizens. In 1706 he married Lucy
Parke, daughter of Daniel Parke, governor of the Leeward Islands. ^
For the next decade he lived the life of a country gentleman, a
life well-documented in the earliest of his diaries to survive. '^
Eventually, however, he accumulated a number of private business
concerns that required a trip to England. He found it necessary
to settle the complicated estate of his father-in-law Daniel Parke,
who had been murdered in an uprising on Antigua in 1710, and
he had several grievances against Virginia's resident governor,
Alexander Spotswood, that he wished to present to the Board
of Trade. During the winter of 1714-1715, he sailed for England.
Except for a period of about a year and a half — December, 1719
to the summer of 1721 — when he was back in Virginia, Byrd
spent the next ten years in the British Isles. He re-entered London
society with ease, renewing his friendships with Egmont, Argyll,
Orrery, Wager, and other friends from his student days. He visited
their homes and began to acquire their portraits.

Byrd kept a diary and wrote a great many letters, probably
more than any other colonial American save Cotton Mather. It
is very frustrating, therefore, to find almost nothing written by
Byrd about his paintings. Perhaps he wrote about them in those
diaries which have disappeared, but at present we have only the
diary entry for 25 January 1718 and two letters written in the
mid- 1730s in which he mentions specific pictures, and nothing
at all about his collection as a whole.

The earliest reference we have to a painting in Byrd's collection
is the 1718 entry in his diary: "... about 3 o'clock went to the
Duke of Argyll's, where I stayed two hours before the Duke came
home . . . The Duke was merry and gave us some tokay. About

May, 1988 21

Figure 2. William Byrd II, attributed to Sir Godfrey Kneller, c. 1693-1700,
English. Oil on canvas, 49 1 /2 X 39 3/4. Courtesy of the Colonial Williamsburg
Foundation, accession 1936-361.

seven I waited on the Duke to the coffeehouse, and asked him
for his picture, which he promised me. " " We know that the Duke
complied, since his portrait was in Byrd's collection and it indeed
exists today. From the matter-of-fact fashion in which he mentions
the request in his diary, however, we may assume that it was not
the first portrait to come into his possession; there are two or three
others which he almost certainly acquired earlier.

22

MESDA

One of these paintings, and possibly the first to enter his
collection, was a portrait of Byrd himself. This portrait (Fig. 2),
shows a young man with a sensuous face. We see a man-about-
town, a wit, "a bit of a strutting peacock." It is a popular notion
in the South that all British ancestral portraits from the first quarter
of the eighteenth century were painted by Sir Godfrey Kneller,
and most of the portraits in Byrd's collection have been attributed
to him at one time or another. Byrd's likeness, however, indeed

Figure 3- Sir Robert Southwell, attributed to the studio of Sir Godfrey Kneller,
c. 1696-1704. English. Oil on canvas. 49 X 39 1/2. Collection of the Virginia
Historical Society, MRF S- 14277.

May, 1988

23

Figure 4. Daniel Parke, by John Closterman, c. 1703, English. Oil on canvas,
48 3/4X39. Collection of the Virginia Historical Society , MRFS-14278. Editor's
note: the diamonds around the miniature portrait of Queen Anne are of a
cabachon cut.

is one of the very few which can be attributed to Kneller, or at
least to his studio, with some certainty. After Kneller became
England's leading portrait painter, he seldom painted an entire
portrait. He painted the face directly onto the canvas, drew the
pose in outline, then called upon his assistants to complete the
painting. 12 This may have been the case with the Byrd portrait.

24

MESDA

The portrait must have been painted near the end of Byrd's
first sojourn in England or sometime during his second
(1697-1704). He may have commissioned it to mark his election
to the Royal Society in 1696. Another portrait perhaps acquired
at this time is that of Byrd's mentor, Sir Robert Southwell (Fig.
3). How Byrd came into possession of it is not known. He may
have received it directly from Sir Robert himself or from
Southwell's son Edward. It is equally possible that the Virginian
purchased it directly from Sir Godfrey Kneller's studio, for the
portrait is a copy of one which Kneller painted about 1685-90.
Although Kneller's own hand is nowhere apparent in the copy,
it probably was produced under his supervision by assistants.

A third portrait acquired by Byrd at an early date was that
of his father-in-law, Daniel Parke (Fig. 4). Parke, a Virginian,
had been an aide-de-camp to John Churchill, Duke of
Marlborough at the Battle of Blenheim; Parke held a colonel's
commission. Marlborough chose him to deliver the news of the
13 August 1704 victory to Queen Anne. By custom, the bearer
of good news received £500. When Queen Anne received Parke
and asked him to name his reward, he requested not the money
but Her Majesty's portrait. "The flattered Queen ordered for him
a miniature set in diamonds and gave him not £500 but 1000
guineas." "I think 500 pound is enough for the bearer," wrote
Marlborough when next he sent news of a victory. Parke sat for
at least three portraits and, since he is wearing the Queen's
miniature in all three, they were painted no earlier than late
August, 1704. Furthermore, since he was appointed governor of
the Leeward Islands in 1705, they could not have been painted
later than 1706, when he sailed for the Caribbean. The three artists
who painted Parke were Sir Godfrey Kneller, Michael Dahl, and
John Closterman; it was Closterman's portrait that became part
of Byrd's collection.'^ Byrd married Lucy Parke in 1706, and it
is possible that the portrait was a wedding present from Colonel
Parke. The Colonel's other daughter, Frances, was also married
about this time, in either 1706 or late 1705, to John Custis.
Another version of the Closterman portrait has descended in that
branch of Parke's descendants. This suggests that Parke's
daughters received the copies of their father's portraits at about
the same time.

We may suppose, therefore, that William Byrd owned three
portraits at the time he returned to England in 1715; the subjects
were Byrd himself, Daniel Parke, and Sir Robert Southwell. The

May, 1988 25

ownership of family portraits, including the head of the
household, was not unusual among wealthy Virginia planters.
No portraits of Byrd's parents are known; presumably they were
not painted due to the lack of artists working in Virginia in the
late 17th century.''* The elder Byrd did wish to have portraits of
his family in his house, however. In 1690 he wrote to his
brother-in-law, Daniel Horsmanden, that "I . . . hope you will
send us (according to your promise) yours (with your fair lady's)
picture to adorn my new house. "'^ There is no evidence that
Horsmanden complied with this request since no such portraits
are known to have been a Westover, but Byrd's letter is interesting
in view of the many portraits of family and friends later acquired
by his son. It shows that both father and son were aware of the
importance of portraits in maintaining ties with distant relatives
and acquaintances, but William Byrd II expanded on that con-
cept by his creation of a Virginia version of a traditional English
portrait collection.

The earliest English portrait collections date from the first half
of the 16th century. At that time England had entered a relatively
stable political period. Increasingly large parcels of land had come
into private ownership, and manor houses were rapidly replac-
ing fortified castles as the seats of country estates.'^ In a similar
fashion, portraiture began to flourish in Virginia after the threat
of starvation and annihilation by the Indians had passed and the
colonists left stockaded settlements to acquire large tracts of land
and build plantation houses. Many Englishmen became wealthy
on plunder from the monasteries suppressed by King Henry VIII
and commissioned portraits of themselves to mark their new
position in society. They acquired portraits of past and present
English monarchs since a royal portrait was a symbol of loyalty
to the Crown; they also commissioned likenesses of prominent
English and European individuals, both men and women. The
most notable of the early collectors was John, Lord Lumley
(1533?- 1609), who owned many portraits of his family, his English
and foreign contemporaries, and English royalty, including
Holbein's drawings of Henry VII and Henry VIII. '^ During the
seventeenth century, the portrait was considered to be equal to
a written biography in preserving a person's fame and merit. The
examination of portraits, as portrait painter Jonathan Richard-
son noted in his 1715 Essay on the Theory of Painting, stimulated
individuals to become "excited to imitate the Good Actions, and
persuaded to shun the Vices of those whose Examples are thus

26 MESDA

set before them."^^ What has been called "the most splendid
portrait gallery ever put together by a statesman in England" '^
was assembled by Edward Hyde, 1st Earl of Clarendon
(1609-1674) in the years following Charles Il's restoration to the
throne in 1660. Part of Clarendon's collection contained portraits
of famous men of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, but the
bulk of it consisted of portraits of people he knew and who were
prominent during the period in which he lived. The Clarendon
collection was thus an iconographic account of late seventeenth-
century English history. The Westover collection represents an
American parallel, although two generations removed. ^^ The
reason why men such as Byrd and Clarendon collected the portraits
of family and friends was best expressed by Samuel Johnson:

Whoever is delighted with his own picture must derive
his pleasure from the pleasure of another. Every man is
always present to himself, and has, therefore, little need
of his own resemblance, nor can desire it, but for the sake
of those whom he loves, and by whom he hopes to be
remembered. The use of this art is a natural and reasonable
consequence of affection; and though, like other human
actions, it is often complicated with pride, yet even such
pride is more laudable than that by which palaces are
covered with pictures that, however excellent, neither
imply the owner's virtue, nor excite it.

Genius is chiefly exerted in historical pictures; and the
art of the painter of portraits is often lost in the obscurity
of the subject. But it is in painting as in life; what is
greatest is not always best. 1 should grieve to see Reynolds
transfer to heroes and to goddesses, to empty splendour
and to airy fiction, that art which is now employed in
diffusing friendship, in reviving tenderness, in quickening
the affections of the absent, and continuing the presence
of the dead.^'

Byrd's collection provided a way of ' 'visiting' ' with his friends
after returning to Virginia. Byrd was aware of this and expressed
himself on the subject in an engaging letter to his friend John
Perceval, Earl of Egmont:

I had the honour of your Lordships commands of the
9th of September [1735], and since that have [had] the

May, 1988 27

pleasure of conversing a great deal with your picture. It
is incomparably well done & the painter has not only hit
you ayr, but some of the vertues too which usd to soften
and enliven your features. So that every connoisseur that
sees it, can see t'was drawn for a generous, benevolent,
& worthy person. It is no wonder perhaps that I coud
discern so many good things in the portrait, when I knew
them so well in the original, just like those who pick out
the meaning of the Bible, altho' in a strange language,
because they were acquainted with the subject before. But
I own I was pleasd to find some strangers able to read your
Lordships character on the canvas, as plain as if they had
been physiognomists by profession."

Nine months earlier he had written to his sister-in-law, Jane
Pratt Taylor, "We often discourse with you in effigie, and call
the painter a bungler for falling so short of the original. I hope
you are not grown so thin as he has made you, because a lady
can't loose her enbonpoint, without haveing some of her health
go along with it."^^ (Fig. 5)

Although the Byrds owned many more portraits than most
Virginians, other families did acquire such paintings. William
Fitzhugh (1651-1701) arrived in Virginia about 1673, purchased
a tract of land in Stafford County, and built it into an estate
patterned after that of the English country gentry. Portraits were
an important part of Fitzhugh's manner of living. In 1687, he
wrote his brother Henry in England: "As in my last I intimated
& desired your Picture & our Coat of Arms ... so again I must
repeat my former desires & wishes either to see you in person,
or to see you truly personated by your lovely picture. "^^ When
Fitzhugh died in 1701, he bequeathed to his son William "my
own & Wife's pictures & the other 6 pictures of my Relations."
Contemporaries of William Byrd I, William Randolph of Turkey
Island (1651-1711), Robert Boiling (1646-1709), and Richard Lee
II (1647-1714) all owned portraits of themselves, and Randolph
and Lee owned portraits of their wives as well.^^ The first decades
of the eighteenth century saw a great increase in the number of
portraits painted in and imported to Virginia. Around 1722
William Brodnax (1675-1727) of Jamestown commissioned
portraits of himself, his wife, and their two sons and daughter;
the same artist appears to have painted the seven members of
the Edward Jaquelin family of Jamestown. ^^ From a study of wills,

28 MESDA

Figure 3. Jane Pratt Taylor, l?y Enoch Seeman, 1734. English. Oil on canvas,
30 1 14 X 40. Collection of the Virginia Historical Society.

inventories, and public records it would appear that most
well-to-do Virginians of the first quarter of the eighteenth century
owned several family portraits and a number of engravings. The
latter often were likenesses of the current or a past monarch. In
Prince William County, merchant William Dunlop (d.l739)
owned a collection of prints of English notables, including John
Milton, John Gay, Nicholas Rowe (Byrd's classmate at the Middle
Temple), and Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford. ^^

May, 1988

29

Figure 6. B3.mstet Dutton, artist umc/enttfied, not dated, English. Oil on canvas,
29 3/4 X 23. Courtesy of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, accession
1966-211.

What distinguished the collection of William Byrd II from
those of his Virginia neighbors was its size, scope, and quality.
He owned approximately thirty paintings, far more than anyone
else in the colony; with one or two exceptions, he acquired these
through his own means rather than by inheritance. The artists
were among the best of the day. If very few are actually products
of Sir Godfrey Kneller's studio, it should be observed that Byrd
patronized artists whose reputations at the time were as great as

30

MESDA

Sir Godfrey's, or nearly so. Byrd's collection should be compared
not with those of his neighbors in Virginia, but with the ones
found in the country houses of England.

Byrd's appreciation of the fine arts is reflected in his owner-
ship of a number of books on the subject, including Du Fresnoy's
1695 The Art of Painting and Roger de Piles's 1681 Dissertation
sur Ouranges des plus fame ux Peintres. From 1717 (possibly
earlier) until 4 March 1718 he studied drawing with Eleazar Albin
(fl. 1713-1759), a noted watercolorist and naturalist. ^^ That Byrd
was considered to be a connoisseur by his family and friends can
be seen in a letter to him from his brother-in-law John Custis,
dated 10 April 1723: "[I] entreat you to get me two peices of
as good painting as you can procure ... I should not give you
this trouble but that I well know you have good judgment in
painting and I had much rather have none than have daubing. "^°

It is not known how the artists were selected to paint the
portraits that Byrd owned, but it is probable that they were chosen
by the sitters. The Duke of Argyll, for instance, was a major patron
of the Scottish painter William Aikman, and a number of portraits
of the Duke by this artist exist, including that which belonged
to Byrd. Byrd's portrait of Sir Robert Walpole is a copy of one
which may have belonged to Sir Robert Walpole himself;
unfortunately, the artists who executed both the original and the
copy are not known. ^' Oft-portrayed individuals such as Walpole
— probably the most-painted man of his time — and Argyll might
have given Byrd copies of portraits already painted, while lesser
individuals like Sir Wilfrid Lawson (Fig. 8) and "Barrister" Dutton
(Fig. 6) may have given him original portraits, as Nathaniel
Walthoe later did. 32 There is no evidence that Byrd paid for any
of these portraits. They seem rather to have been given to him
in response to his requests. Gifts of this sort were occasionally
reciprocated, but the only one of Byrd's English friends who is
known to have owned a portrait of the Virginian was the Earl
of Orrery, whose own likeness belonged to Byrd. It is possible
that the two men exchanged portraits at the same time, although
there is no documentation of that.

One anist may be considered at length in a discussion of Byrd's
collection, since at least three of Byrd's paintings can be attributed
to him. This is Hans Hysing (also spelled Hyssing and Huyssing;
d. 1753). A native of Stockholm, he emigrated to England in
1700 and studied under Michael Dahl. A fellow Swede working
in London by 1682, Dahl has been called "Kneller's only serious

May, 1988 31

Figure 7. William Byrd II, attributed to Hans Hy sing, c. 1722-1726, English.
This portrait belonged to the Earl of Orrery and was not part of the Westover
collection. Oil on canvas, 30X41. Courtesy of the Virginia Historical Society.

rival in public patronage."" Dahl did not paint as well as Sir
Godfrey, but he was an artist of merit, and a pleasant, unassuming
man whose geniality is reflected in the portraits he painted. His
pupil, Hysing, continued this style well into the eighteenth
century. The portrait of William Byrd which belonged to the Earl
of Orrery and is now owned by the Virginia Historical Society
(Fig. 7) has been attributed to Hysing. ^^ A portrait of Sir Wilfrid

32

MESDA

Figures. Slr'^Aindlja.-wson, attributed to Hans Hystng, c. 1722-1726, English.
Oil on canvas, 50 1/2 X 39 1/2. Courtesy of the Colonial Williamsburg
Foundation, accession 1966-210.

Lawson in Byrd's collection (Fig. 8) also can be attributed to him;
it is characteristic of his style and moreover is a virtual duplicate
of the Byrd portrait. Only the background and, of course, the
head, are different; the pose and costume are virtually identical.
The "incomparably well done" portrait of the Earl of Egmont
mentioned above is almost certainly Hysing's work; it is a
bust-length replica of a three-quarter length painting rendered

May, 1988

33

in 1733.'^ Egmont's pose in this painting is a mirror image of
that in the portraits of Byrd and Lawson. The repHca may be the
painting mentioned in Egmont's diary under date of 25 February
1734: "I . . . called on Mr. Hyssing, the painter, in Leicester
Fields to pay him for the copy of my picture (a head), which cost
4 guineas. "^*^ He unfortunately does not say who the copy was
for, but since no other copy of the Hysing portrait is known, ^^
it probably was painted for Byrd.

The one signed English portrait in Byrd's collection is that
of his sister-in-law, Jane Pratt Taylor, which bears the signature
of Enoch Seeman and the date 1734 (Fig. 5). Seeman
(1690?- 1745), a native of Danzig, Prussia (now Gdansk, Poland),
emigrated to England as a young man, and by 1717 enjoyed a
substantial patronage. His sitters seem to have been individuals
who were less prepared to pay the fees commanded by the leading
portrait painters; in 1743 he was given the commission to paint
Lady Cust and her nine children because Hogarth had asked too
high a price. A remark by the Duchess of Marlborough suggests
that he was employed by the upper classes as a copyist: "Seeman
copies very well, and sometimes draws the faces like."^^ This
suggests that he made accurate copies of other artist's work but
may have been less successful in painting from life. Byrd may
have expressed dissatisfaction with Mrs. Taylor's portrait in calling
the "painter a bungler for falling so short of the original," but
it is equally possible that he was simply flattering the sitter.

For nearly a decade after his final return to Virginia, Byrd
did not add to his collection, but in 1734 or 1735 the portraits
of Egmont and Jane Taylor arriyed from England. It was in the
latter year that Byrd acquired his first paintings by an American
artist. These were portraits of his children by Charles Bridges
(1670-1747). Bridges arrived in Williamsburg from England in
May, 1735. By December of the same year he had met Byrd and
had received a commission to paint the Byrd children. On 22
December Byrd wrote to Alexander Spotswood, introducing
Bridges by observing that "He has drawn my children, and several
others in this neighbourhood, and tho' he have not the masterly
hand of a Lilly [i.e., Sir Peter Lely] or a Kneller, yet had he liv'd
so long ago, as when places were given to the most deserving,
he might have pretended to be serjeant-painter of Virginia. "^^
The implication is that Bridges painted all six of Byrd's children,
but this almost certainly was not the case. His two daughters by
his first wife were in their twenties, and Byrd already owned a

34 MESDA

Figure 9- Evelyn Byrd, artist unidentified, c. 1723-1726. English. Oil on canvas.
30 1/4X40 1/4. Courtesy of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, accession
1941-76.

portrait of his elder daughter, Evelyn, painted in England (Fig.
9). While Bridges may have painted Byrd's younger daughter,
Wilhelmina, and the children by his second wife (Anne, Maria,
William III, and Jane), Mary Willing Byrd's will lists portraits
of Anne, Maria, and William only. Portraits believed to be the
likenesses of Anne and William now belong to Colonial Williams-
burg, and are almost certainly the work of Bridges; the portrait

May, 1988

35

Figure 10. Anne Byrd, i>y Charles Bridges, 1733. Oil on canvas, 30 3/8 X 40
3/8. Courtesy of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, accession 1937-183.

of Maria Byrd has not been located. In both of the surviving works,
the children are shown full-length in antique or classical costume,
standing before a wooded background. The girl (Fig. 10) is shown
petting a dog; the boy (Fig. 11) is accompanied by a black servant.
This type of pose, popular in England more than a generation
earlier, had gone out of fashion there, but the elderly Bridges
clung to an antiquated style that would have also appealed to

36

MESDA

Byrd, since poses of this type were in fashion when he Hved in
England. "^0

Mary Wilhng Byrd's will lists three portraits of William Byrd
II and it has been speculated that at least one of these was painted
by Bridges. ^^ There is no evidence of this, however. If Byrd had
sat for Bridges, he would surely have mentioned that fact in his
letter to Spotswood; it is possible, of course, that Byrd gave Bridges
commissions after 1735. In England, it was a long-established

Figure 11. William Byrd III, attributed to Charles Bndgei, c. 1733. Od on
canvas, dimensions not recorded. Courtesy of the Colonial Williamburg
Foundation, accession G1986-243, MRF S-5214.

May, 1988

37

tradition that lesser artists were employed to paint children. ^^
Byrd's likeness already had been captured by artists more skilled
than Bridges, so there would have been little need for him to
sit for Bridges, especially since he already owned three portraits
of himself.

It is not known how Byrd displayed his collection at Westover,
but some conjecture is possible. The family portraits probably
hung in the mansion proper. The portraits of Byrd's friends
probably hung in the east flanker of Westover. This dependency
was not connected to the main house, but it is known to have
contained the library. This building (Fig. 1, right side of the main
house), now missing, offered space for the exhibition of paintings
along with Byrd's bookcases. ^^ In England, portrait collections
were housed in "long galleries" where their owners could study
them while exercising on days when the weather was too inclement
to seek recreation outdoors. ^^ We know that Byrd used his library
at Westover for the same purpose. He recorded in his diary entry
for 2 January 1721 that he had "... walked about in the library
because it rained and I could not walk abroad. "^^ He no doubt
was influenced by the manner in which his English counterparts
displayed their portrait collections. Samuel Pepys's library
contained seven presses filled with books and surmounted by
portraits of such contemporaries as John Evelyn. '^^ When Byrd's
library of nearly 4,000 volumes was sold in 1777, the adver-
tisements for the sale stated that the books were "contained in
twenty double presses of black walnut."'*^

Byrd family tradition holds that Nathaniel Walthoe, clerk of
the Virginia General Assembly, "Left a diamond ring to the
Second Col. Byrd, upon condition that he would permit his
portrait to hang up in the same room with those of the noble-
men. . . . "^^ This portrait (Fig. 12) may be the work of William
Dering, a dancing master in Williamsburg who also was a portrait
painter. Byrd was acquainted with him.^^ If this tradition is correct,
Walthoe 's portrait was the last to enter the Westover collection
during William Byrd's lifetime. 5° Walthoe 's alleged request would
appear to indicate that the collection was known and admired
by Byrd's fellow Virginians.

William Byrd II died on 26 August 1744. His will makes no
mention of his collection except that his entire estate, including
"pictures," was to go to his son, William III; in addition, his
daughters were left cash bequests. ^^ The paintings remained at
Westover for another seventy years, until the death of his

38 MESDA

Figure 12. Nathaniel ^/J'ihhoe, possibly by VCilliam Denng. c. 1744-1750. Oil
on canvas, 293/4X24 5/4. Courtesy of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.
accession 1956-362.

daughter-in-law, Mary Willing Byrd." She died in March, 1814;
her will, probated the following month, divided the paintings
among her children and stepchildren. The largest portions went
to her sons Chades Willing, Richard Willing, and William Powel
Byrd. Richard died in 1815, and his brothers apparently declined
to take possession of the portraits. Most passed into the posses-
sion of their sister Evelyn, the wife of Benjamin Harrison of
Brandon, and have descended through this branch of Byrd

May, 1988

39

descendants. A number are now in museum collections: Colonial
Williamsburg Foundation owns eight, the Virginia Historical
Society owns six, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts each own one. The balance of the
collection is either privately owned or has disappeared. Happily,
most of the collection is known to exist, and it is entirely possible
that the missing pictures will be found.

From the evidence provided by his diary, his library, and his
collection, we know that William Byrd II was imbued with a good
sense of history, and art, and that he was quite aware of his own
status. He was proud of his friendship with the great men of
England, and considered that his collection served two purposes:
it allowed Byrd to visit vicariously with his English friends after
he had returned to Virginia, and it demonstrated Byrd's own
prominence to his Virginia friends and neighbors. It is unfortunate
that such a prolific writer as Byrd apparently wrote almost nothing
regarding his pictures. The paintings themselves, however, tell
us in their own way as much about this fascinating gentleman
and his world as do his letters and diaries.

Mr. Meschutt is currently writing a catalogue raisonne of the Westover
collection. This article in its original form was presented in 1988 as
partial completion of the Master's Degree in History Museum Studies
at the Cooperstown Graduate Program, State University of New York.

40 MESDA

FOOTNOTES

1. Will of Mary Willing Byrd, Charles City County, Virginia, Will Book 2.
1808-1824, dated December 1813, recorded 21 April 1814, p. 269. This
will is printed in the Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 30 (April,
1930), 145-154.

2. Marion Tinling, ed., The Correspondence of the Three William Byrds of
Westover, Virginia (Charlottesville, Va.: The University Press of Virginia,
1977), I, 3-7.

3. Kenneth A. Lockridge, The Diary, and Life, of William Byrd 11 of Virginia,
1674-1744 (Chapel Hill, N.C.: The University of North Carolina Press,
1987), 14-21.

4. Tinling, Correspondence, I, 195-202. This is the best biographical sketch
of William Byrd II; that in the Dictionary of American Biography was
written before Byrd's diaries were discovered.

5. Tinling, Correspondence, I, 167, n2; the Royal Society is the oldest scien-
tific society in the world and probably the best known. It grew out of weekly
meetings held by English scientists in London in the I640s and was officially
organized in 1660 as the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural
Knowledge.

6. Byrd is buried in his garden at Westover. The inscription on his tombstone
reads:

Being born to one of the amplest fortunes in this country.
He was early sent to England for his education.
Where under the care and direction of Sir Robert Southwell,
And ever favored with his particular instructions.
He made a happy proficiency in polite and varied learning.
By the means of this same noble friend,

He was introduced to the acquaintance of many of the first persons
of his age

For knowledge, wit, virtue, birth, of high station.
And particularly contracted a most intimate and bosom friendship
With the learned and illustrious Charles Boyle, Earl of Orrery.
He was called to the bar in the Middle Temple,
Studied for some time in the Low Countries,
Visited the Court of France,
And was chosen Fellow of the Royal Society.
Thus eminently fitted for the service and ornament of his country,
He was made Receiver-General of His Majesty's revenues here,
Was thrice appointed public agent to the Court and Ministry of
England,

And being thirty-seven years a member.
At last became President of the Council of that Colony.
To all this were added a great elegance of taste and life.
The well-bred gentleman and polite companion.
The splendid economist and prudent father of a family,
With the constant enemy of all exhorbitant power.
And hearty friend to the liberties of his country.
Personal observation, Westover, Virginia, 27 October 1987.

May, 1988 41

7. So named by Byrd because the view reminded him of a similar vista at
Richmond, England.

8. The estate had been purchased by William Byrd I in 1688.

9. Douglas Southall Freeman, George Washington (New York: Charles
Scribner's Sons, 1948), II, 279-285.

10. Louis B. Wright and Marion Tinling, The Secret Diary of William Byrd
ofWestover, 1709-1712 (Richmond, Va.: Dietz Press, 1941).

11. Louis B. Wright and Marion Tinling, eds., William Byrd of Virginia: The
London Diary (1717-1721) and Other Writings (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1958), 70.

12. Wayne Craven, Colonial American Portraiture (Cambridge, England:
Cambridge University Press, 1986), 212; David Piper, Catalogue of
Seventeenth-Century Portraits in the National Portrait Gallery (Cambridge,
England: Cambridge University Press, 1963), 402. The best study of Kneller
isj. Douglas Stewart, Sir Godfrey Kneller and the English Baroque Portrait
(Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1983).

13. Freeman, Washington, 280 and n.25.

14. The possibility exists that there was one artist working in Virginia in the
1690s, an indentured servant of William Fitzhugh. This servant, not
otherwise identified, was a trained engraver, and Fitzhugh asked his London
agent to send "colours for painting, pencils [i.e., brushes]. Walnut
Oyl . . . together with half a doz. 3 quarter clothes [stretched canvases]
to set up a painter." Craven, Portraiture, 186.

A painting of a boy (Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond) and
a miniature of a man (unlocated) have both been reproduced as portraits
of William Byrd I, but are not of him. They evidently depict Byrd family
members of a later generation. William I visited England in 1687-1688,
but there is no record of his having sat for a portrait at that time.

15. William Byrd I to Daniel Horsmanden, 25 July 1690, Virginia Historical
Society, quoted in Tinling, Correspondence, I, 121-122. Daniel's son, also
named Daniel, emigrated to New York and eventually became chief justice
of that colony.

16. The Treasure Houses of Britain: Five Hundred Years of Private Patronage
and Art Collecting, catalogue of an exhibition held at the National Gallery
of Art, Washington, D.C., 3 November 1985 through 16 March 1986 (New
Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985), 29.

17. The Holbein is now owned by the National Portrait Gallery, London. Most
of Lumley's collection has been dispersed (what remains has descended to
the Earl of Scarborough), but a very detailed inventory was made in 1590.

18. Jonathan Richardson, An Essay on the Theory of Painting (2nd ed., 1725;
rpt. London: Scolar Press, 1971), 14.

19. Treasure Houses, 30. An excellent account of the Clarendon collection is
Robin Gibson, Catalogue of Portraits in the Collection of the Earl of
Clarendon (London: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 1977).

20. A number of the Westover portraits are still in their original frames; these
frames are uniformly black with carved gilt ornamentation. Treasure Houses,
31. A noteworthy feature of the Clarendon collection was that it hung in
"fine uniform frames."

42 MESDA

21. Dr. Samuel Johnson, Idler, no. 43 (24 February 1759). Quoted in Charles
Coleman Sellers, Benjamin Franklin in Portraiture (New Haven, Conn.:
Yale University Press, 1962), 5.

22. William Byrd II to the Earl of Egmont, 12 July 1736, Virginia Historical
Society, quoted in Tinling, Correspondence, II, 487.

23. William Byrd II to Jane Pratt Taylor, 10 October 1735, Virginia Historical
Society, Ibid., 462. Jane Pratt, daughter of Lord Chief Justice John Pratt,
married in 1719 Thomas Taylor, Jr., brother of Maria Taylor Byrd, William
Byrd's second wife. Ibid., 833. I would like to thank Virginius C. Hall,
Jr., for bringing this letter to my attention and for clarifying Mrs. Taylor's
identity.

24. Craven, Portraiture, 184.

25. "The Will of William Fitzhugh," Virginia Magazine of History and
Biography 2 (1895), 276-277; Craven, Portraiture, 184.

26. The portraits of Mr. and Mrs. Randolph belong to the Virginia Historical
Society; those of Mr. and Mrs. Lee are privately owned; and that of Boiling
is owned by the College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia.

27. Mary Black, "Contributions Toward a History of Early Eighteenth-Century
New York Portraiture: The Identification of the Aetatis Suae and Wendell
Limners," The American Art Journal \1 (Autumn 1980)4: 15. The artist
is thought by Mary Black to have been Nehemiah Panridge (fl. 1715-1730),
who was also active as a portrait painter in New York's Hudson River Valley.
The Brodnax and Jaquelin portraits are on deposit at the Virginia Museum
of Fine Arts, Richmond.

28. Willmm and Mary Quarterly 15 (April, 1907), 279; Craven, Portraiture, 197.

29. Ibid., 205-206; Wright and Tinling, The London Diary, 49, 88.

30. John Custis to William Byrd II, 10 April 1723, Custis Papers, Library of
Congress, quoted in Tinling, Correspondence, I, 341-342.

31. John Kerslake, Early Georgian Portraits in the National Portrait Gallery
(London: Her Majesty's Stationers Office, 1977), 203, suggests that the
original might be by Michael Dahl. I have seen Byrd's copy and a
photograph of the original. Byrd's picture appears to be by a different,
less talented hand from that which drew the original.

32. The portraits of Lawson and Dutton owned by Byrd are the only ones known
of those gentlemen.

33- Ellis Waterhouse, Painting in Britain: 1330-1790 (Baltimore, Md. : Penguin
Books, 1969), 97.

34. Byrd gave the portrait to his friend Charles Boyle, 4th Earl of Orrery, who
bequeathed it to Sarah Otway, a niece of Maria Taylor Byrd, second wife
of William Byrd II. It was purchased from her heirs in this century by a
direct descendant of the sitter, also named William Byrd. His son, another
William Byrd, gave it to the Virginia Historical Society in 1973. Virginius
C. Hall, Jr., Portraits in the Collection of the Virginia Historical Society:
A Catalogue (Charlottesville, Va.: The University Press of Virginia, 1981),
41-42. I would like to thank Dr. J. Douglas Stewart for suggesting the
attribution to Hysing.

May, 1988 43

35 . The three-quarter-length originally belonged to Egmont and is now owned
by Oglethorpe University, Atlanta, Georgia. Byrd's replica of the Earl of
Egmont was owned in 1922 by Mrs. Stephen Decatur Mayo of Gloucester,
Virginia, but is at present unlocated.

36. Diary of the First Earl of Egmont (London: Historical Manuscripts
Commission, 1923), II, 154.

37. Information in a letter from Dr. Malcolm Rogers, Deputy Director, National
Portrait Gallery, London, to the author, 21 October 1987.

38. Waterhouse, Fainting in Britain, 128.

39. William Byrd II to Alexander Spotswood, 22 December 1735, Virginia
Historical Society, quoted in Tinling, Correspondence, II, 468.

40. Graham Hood, Charles Bridges and William Dering: Two Virginia Fainters,
1733-1750 (Williamsburg, Va.: The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation,
1978), 100.

41. Henry Wilder Foote, "Charles Bridges, 'Sergeant-Painter of Virginia,'
1735-1740," Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 60 (January,
1952), 9, 26, 27.

42. Stewart, Sir Godfrey Kneller, 75.

43. Mark R. Wenger, "Westover: William Byrd's Mansion Reconsidered."
Master's thesis. University of Virginia, 1980, 53. The east flanker burned
during the Civil War.

44. John Cornforth and John Fowler, Eighteenth Century Decoration in England
(Princeton, N. J.: The Pyne Press, 1974), 232; Treasure Houses, 124.

45. Wright and Tinling, London Diary, 494.

46. Wenger, "Westover," 53.

47. Ibid.

48. W. S. Morton, contrib., "The portraits at Lower Brandon and Upper
Brandon, Virginia," William and Mary Quarterly, 2nd series, 10 (October,
1930): 340 (listed erroneously as "Mr. Waltham"). The diamond, which
has been reset several times, was owned by a Byrd descendant in 1940.

49. Hood, Bridges, 100.

50. The possibility exists that Walthoe gave it to William Byrd III rather than
his father. Apart from the portraits of Byrd family members, Walthoe's
is the only portrait of a Virginian in the Westover collection.

51. A copy of Byrd's will belongs to the James Monroe Museum and Memorial
Library, Fredericksburg, Virginia; it is printed in Tinling, Correspondence,
II, 597-598, 600.

52. Mary Willing Byrd was the widow of William Byrd III, who had died by
his own hand on New Year's Day, 1777. Several portraits were added to
the collection during their ownership, all but one of family members. The
exception was a portrait of Benjamin Franklin, who had known Mrs. Byrd
when she was growing up in Philadelphia.

44 MESDA

APPENDIX

Preliminary Checklist of the Paintings Owned by William Byrd II.

Most of the Westover collection subsequently hung at Brandon (built c.
1765) and Upper Brandon (built 1820), homes of the Harrison family. The
Harrisons of Brandon were descendants of William Byrd II through his grand-
daughter Evelyn (b. 1766-after 1814), who married Benjamin Harrison of
Brandon (born 1743-1807). The remainder of the paintings from Byrd's
collection descended in other branches of his family. All of the paintings from
Westover appear to have remained in the possession of the various Byrd
descendants until the early part of this century.

1. William Byrd 11, attributed to Sir Godfrey Kneller, circa 1695-1700. Owner:
Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Williamsburg, Virginia.

2. William Byrd II, artist unknown. Listed in Mary Willing Byrd's will.
Unlocated

3. William Byrd II, artist unknown. Listed in Mary Willing Byrd's will.
Unlocated.

4. Mrs. William Byrd II, ne'e Lucy Parke (1688-1716), artist unknown. Listed
in Mary Willing Byrd's will. Unlocated. (Possibly the portrait in a private
collection in Virginia.)

5. Mrs. William Byrd II, nee Maria Taylor (1698-1771), by an unidentified
British artist, circa 1725. Owner: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

6. Anne Byrd (daughter of William and Maria Taylor Byrd, b. 1725), by
Charles Bridges, 1735. Owner: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.

7. Evelyn Sjr^ (daughter of William and Lucy Parke Byrd) (1707-1737), by
an unidentified British artist, circa 1725. Owner: Colonial Williamsburg
Foundation.

8. William Byrd III (son of William and Maria Taylor Byrd) (1728-1777),
attributed to Charles Bridges, 1735. Owner: Colonial Williamsburg
Foundation.

9. William Blathwayt (1649-1717), politician, by an unidentified British artist.
Mentioned in Mary Willing Byrd's will. Unlocated.

10. Martha Blount (1690-1762), "Patty Blount," friend of Alexander Pope,
by an unidentified British artist. Mentioned in Mary Willing Byrd's will
(erroneously as "Mr. Blunt"). Owner: Private collection of a Byrd
descendant.

11. Charles Boyle, 4th Earl of Orrery (1676-1731), by an unidentified British
artist. Owner: Private collection of a Byrd descendant.

12. Mr. Brent, friend of William Byrd II, listed in Mary Willing Byrd's will,
but not otherwise identified. Artist unknown. Unlocated.

13. John Campbell, 2nd Duke of Argyll (1680-1743), by William Aikman,
circa 1717. Owner: Virginia Historical Society.

14. Mary Churchill, Duchess of Montagu (b. 1689), youngest daughter of John
Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough, studio of Sir Godfrey Kneller, circa
1722-1726. Owner: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.

15. Lady Elizabeth Cromwell {di.. 1709), wife of Edward Southwell, daughter-
in-law of Sir Robert Southwell, and an early inamorata of William Byrd

May, 1988 45

II, by an unidentified British artist. Probably the portrait in the private
collection of a Byrd descendant.

16. Mr. Dutton, a London barrister and friend of William Byrd II (not further
identified), by an unidentified British anist. Owner: Colonial Williamsburg
Foundation.

17. William Anne Keppel, 2nd Earl of Albemarle (1702-1754), by an
unidentified British artist. Owned in 1950 by a Byrd descendant, now
unlocated.

18. Sir Wilfrid Lawson (1696-1737), M. P. for Cumberland, attributed to Hans
Hysing, circa 1722-1726. Owner: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.

19. Charles Montagu, Earl of Halifax (1661-1715), statesman, studio of Michael
Dahl, circa 1710-1715. Owner: Virginia Historical Society.

20. Daniel Parke (1669-1710), father-in-law of William Byrd II, aide-de-campe
to the Duke of Marlborough at the Battle of Blenheim, and Governor of
the Leeward Islands, by John Closterman, circa 1705. Owner: Virginia
Historical Society.

21. John Perceval, 1st Earl of Egmont (1683-1748), attributed to Hans Hysing,
circa 1734. Owner: Private collection of a Byrd descendant.

22. Sir Robert Southwell (1655-1702), diplomat, studio of Sir Godfrey Kneller,
circa 1696-1704. Owner: Virginia Historical Society.

23. Elizabeth Southwell, daughter of Sir Robert Southwell, by an unidentified
British artist. Mentioned in Mary Willing Byrd's will. Unlocated.

24. Mrs. Jane Pratt Taylor, sister-in-law of William Byrd II's second wife, by
Enoch Seeman, 1734. Owner: Virginia Historical Society.

25. Sir Charles Wager (1666-1745), admiral, by an unidentified British artist.
Owner: Private collection of a Byrd descendant.

26. Sir Robert Walpole, 1st Earl of Orford (1676-1745), statesman, by an
unidentified British artist. Owner: Virginia Historical Society.

27. Nathaniel Walthoc (d. 1770), clerk of the Virginia General Assembly,
attributed to William Dering, circa 1744-1750. This may have belonged
to William Byrd III, rather than his father. Owner: Colonial Williamsburg
Foundation.

28. Portrait of a Boy, by an unidentified British artist, circa 1680(?) or later.
This has been identified as a portrait of William Byrd I (1652-1704) but
the painting appears to be a generation later than that of William I's
childhood. Owner: Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.

29. Portrait ' 'of Rubins [sic] ' ' (so listed in Mary Willing Byrd's will). A portrait
of a man, said to be by Peter Paul Rubens, belonged in 1899 to a Byrd
descendant, Mrs. A. C. Bevan of Clarke County, Virginia. Unlocated.

30. Portrait "of Titian" (so listed in Mrs. Byrd's will). A painting said to be
of Venus and by Titian belonged to Byrd descendants in California in 1899-
Unlocated.

46 MESDA

/ would like to thank the following people for their help and support:
Virginius C. Hall, Associate Director, Virginia Historical Society,
Richmond, Virginia; Nelson Lankford, Editor, and Sara Bearss,
Assistant Editor, The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography,
Richmond; Graham Hood, Vice-President and Chief Curator, and
Margaret Gill, Registrar, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation,
Williamsburg, Virginia; Malcolm Rogers, Deputy Director, National
Portrait Gallery, London; Ellen G. Miles, Curator of Painting and
Sculpture, National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C.; J. Douglas
Stewart, Professor of Art History, Queen 's University, Kingston,
Ontario; William Byrd, Princeton, N.J. ; Charles Miller, Baltimore,
Maryland; and Sara Lee Barnes, Associate Editor, Museum of Early
Southern Decorative Arts, Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

May, 1988 47

MESDA seeks manuscripts which treat virtually any facet of southern decorative
art for publication in the JOURNAL. The MESDA staff would also like to
examine any pnvately-held primary research material {documents and manu-
scripts) from the South, and southern newspapers published in 1820 and earlier.

Some back issues of the Journal
are available.

The preparation of xk\^ Journal ^^.s made possible (in part) by a grant from
the Research Tools and Reference Works Program of the National Endowment
for the Humanities, an independent Federal Agency.

Photographs in this issue by the staff of the Museum of Early Southern
Decorative Arts except where noted.

48 MESDA

MUSEUM OF EARLY SOUTHERN DECORATIVE ARTS

Frank L. Horton, Director Ementus

Bradford L. Rauschenberg, Director of Research

Martha Rowe, Research Associate

Sally Gant, Director of Education and Special events

Elizabeth Putney, Associate in Education

Paula Hooper, Education Assistant / Membership Coordinator

John Bivins, Jr., Editor

Sara Lee Barnes, Associate Editor

Pauline Chapman, Office Manager

Wesley Stewart, Photographer